By Phil Hill - EvoLLLution. In both industries, we’re in the heyday of technology-driven changes; a lot of people are looking for dramatic changes to come from the technology in both industries. Related to that, there’s been an increasing amount of investment capital coming from venture capital firms and private equity. It doesn’t mean the changes are going to stick, but a lot of this is driven by investment and the hype going on right now. More...
21 septembre 2014
How Consumer Technology Companies Like Apple Set The Standard for Higher Ed
The strengths and weaknesses of competency-based learning in a digital age
By . Chapter 5 of my open textbook, ‘Teaching in a Digital Age‘, is now published. In Chapter 5, I developed the concept of a learning environment.I am now working on Chapter 6, ‘Models for Designing Teaching and Learning.’ In my last two posts I discussed respectively the appropriateness of the classroom model and the ADDIE model for a digital age. In this post, I explore the same issue for competency-based learning model. Read more...
Teacher Wars and Teaching Machines
By Audrey Watters. Teaching is, according to the subtitle of education journalist Dana Goldstein’s new book, “America’s Most Embattled Profession.” “No other profession,” she argues, ”operates under this level of political scrutiny, not even those, like policing or social work, that are also tasked with public welfare and are paid for with public funds.” More...
Hack Education Weekly News: LAUSD, iPads, and Grenade Launchers
By Audrey Watters. Coursera is pursuing MOOCs-on-demand.
Coursera has partnered with Brazilian universities the University of São Paulo and the State University of Campinas.
edX is relicensing some of its open source software, moving from the AGPL to the Apache license. The latter allows for more commercial and even proprietary software development. Because open. More...
Why Pundits Like to Say Education Isn't Changing. It is. It is!
By Cathy Davidson. Contrary to all those books and op eds decrying the dismal intransigence of higher education and college professors in general, I am finishing an essay (this is an excerpt) and writing a new book on the future of higher education (to be published about 15 months from now by Basic Books--I have to write it first, everyone!!) that makes the exact opposite counter arugment. More...
Opening Up the LMS Walled Garden
By Phil Hill. In yesterday’s post I described where I (and many others) see the LMS market heading in terms of interoperability.
At the same time, the LMS does a very poor job at providing a lot of the learning technologies desired by faculty and students. There is no way that a monolithic LMS can keep up with the market – it cannot match functionality of open internet tools especially without adding feature bloat. More...
Helix: View of an LMS designed for competency-based education
By Phil Hill. Within higher education, we tend to talk about LMS solutions based on an institutional perspective – which systems can serve as the official LMS for an entire institution. While this view is important and forms the basis for my LMS graphics, the emergence of new educational delivery models has led to the development of some interesting program-specific LMS models. One example that I have already written about is 2U’s platform (built on top of Moodle and Adobe Connect) for their specific Online Service Provider (OSP) business. More...
On False Binaries, Walled Gardens, and Moneyball
By Michael Feldstein. D’Arcy Norman started a lively inter-blog conversation like we haven’t seen in the edublogosphere in quite a while with his post on the false binary between LMS and open. His main point is that, even if you think that the open web provides a better learning environment, an LMS provides a better-than-nothing learning environment for faculty who can’t or won’t go through the work of using open web tools, and in some cases may be perfectly adequate for the educational need at hand. More...
Akademische Nomaden
Von . Sieben Studienorte in vier Jahren. In San Francisco startet die erste Eliteuni, die nur online lehrt. Eine Studentin wie Alisha Frederiksson wünscht sich wohl jede Universität. Die 19-Jährige wurde in Ungarn geboren, der Vater ist Schwede, die Mutter Chinesin. Sie ging im kanadischen Vancouver zur Schule, ihren Abschluss machte sie im indischen Pune, wo sie die letzten beiden Schuljahre am internationalen United World College verbrachte. Mehr...
Education at a Glance – 2014 edition published last week!
By Hedda. The newest edition of OECDs annual educational statistics – Education at a Glance – was published last week on 9th of September 2014. The data is organised around some of the key topics in current debates about education – focused on educational attainment, employability, rates of return of education and fee payment. See more...
